K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Two fresh desktops

Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

It’s about time I showed off some new desktops. I was enthralled by the whole gperfection thing I had going on, but I wiped the drive to tinker with Arch on my fast machine (1Ghz and boots in 22 seconds!), then scrapped it and went back to Feisty from scratch. So here’s another Openbox on 7.04 desktop.

Openbox theme is quandar‘s Natura (it comes with Openbox, folks) with the gradient edited out for a flat look. Don’t ask me why, but I prefer that. Cut and paste from here, if you are likewise a non-gradient fan and too lazy to edit it properly.

GTK is rezlooks-charamel, which needs the rezlooks engine, of course. I recompiled the engine from source (it only takes libgtk2.0-dev and about four minutes of your life … don’t forget ./configure –prefix=/usr) and if I remember, I’ll post the deb somewhere in case someone else running Feisty wants it. (Actually, I just tacked it on to here, with the deb extension changed to doc. A little Linux joke.😉 )

Icons are Gion, and I picked those only because they were on the front page, and they seem to match the color scheme. Just about anything that’s mostly brown would work well.

Mouse cursors are Neutral-Plus, which is an excellent, simple, clean mouse cursor with smooth shadow effects.

Finally, the font is, as always, Deja Vu Sans. Call me boring, but I know what I like.

Now for The Little Man, the 300Mhz Arch box (that boots in 37 seconds!), I’m stuck on a blue thing I’ve got here. I did it about a month ago when I was playing with transparencies, and I went back to it recently.

Wallpaper is the Arch Linux rebranding made by freigeist a couple of months ago. There are a lot of variations and versions there, so be prepared to make a tough decision.

Openbox theme is … openboxclean, as you might imagine. I like the light blue outline on the dark blue title bars and handles. I’m considering doing over some of the standard themes I have to follow that convention.

GTK is gtkclean, which has only one fault: The highlight color is too light for my tastes. I usually correct it to properly offset the faint tints.

Icons are … well, I was using Still Life, but I stopped using PCManFM on this machine because the fam daemon seemed to be slowing things down, and went back to Xfe. The good news is that Arch has Xfe 0.98, which has some much-needed icon improvements. The old Win95-knockoff icon sets are changeable with some Gnome-like, Gnome-blue-like and even Human-like icon sets. If you get the chance, check it out. Xfe is much faster and lighter than PCManFM, even if I do like the latter better. In any case, what you see in the screenshot is the default Gnome and hicolor icons left over from a sparse X install.

Mouse cursors are still jimmac’s Vanilla-DMZ, because it looks good and I like it on that machine.

And of course, the font is still Deja Vu Sans. I don’t know why I like that one so much except that it says Linux to me.